Millennialism and Apocalypticism

Millennialism and Apocalypticism. The Bible contains prophecies about a future golden age and the cataclysmic end of the world. Some of these texts are apocalyptic (from the Greek “to reveal” or “uncover”) visions of impending disaster and divine rescue (Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelation). In the New Testament, such texts include the Second Coming of Christ (Matthew 24 and Mark 13, for example) and Christ's millennial (from the Latin mille, “thousand”) reign (Revelation 20). Over time, many Christians have developed elaborate scenarios of the “end times” (including a coming Antichrist; persecution, famines, and plagues; and the battle of Armageddon) and have speculated about “signs of the times” that point to such prophetic fulfillments.

During the Colonial Era, the Puritans John Cotton and Increase and Cotton Mather identified the Roman papacy as the Antichrist and found prophetic significance in their own “errand into the wilderness.” Others like Jonathan Edwards foresaw Christ's return after the world's gradual “christianization” (“postmillennialism”). Christian patriots during the Revolutionary War viewed George III as the Antichrist and America as the persecuted “Woman in the Wilderness” (Revelation 12). Later, Timothy Dwight and others interpreted the excesses of the French Revolution in apocalyptic terms and feared their spread to the New World.

In the Antebellum Era, most Evangelical Protestants were optimistic postmillennialists. Lyman Beecher and Charles G. Finney saw revivals and social reform as signs that the millennium was imminent. Many communal or utopian experiments espoused millennialist views including Mother Ann Lee's United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Coming (Shakers). Shakers saw Lee as the female incarnation of the Second Coming and started communities to prepare for the approaching millennium. John Humphrey Noyes taught that Christ had returned in A.D. 70 but did not establish the earthly millennium because his followers lacked Christian love. To correct this deficit, Noyes founded a community near Putney, Vermont, in 1838, but opposition to his views of “complex marriage” forced a move to Oneida, New York, in 1848. There, commercial success eventually overshadowed millennialist concerns.

A more successful communal group was Joseph Smith's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐Day Saints. Citing a series of divine revelations, including the Book of Mormon, Smith proclaimed Christ's imminent return and even produced a city plan for the new Zion in Jackson County, Missouri, to which site he instructed all Mormons to move. However, the Mormons were driven out of Missouri, and, after a short stay in Nauvoo, Illinois, and Smith's murder, relocated in Utah, where they still await Christ's return.

Also in the 1830s, William Miller (1782–1849), a Baptist preacher from New England, adopting an interpretive approach popular in Great Britain, used “millennial arithmetic” drawn primarily from the Book of Daniel to calculate Christ's return in 1843–1844. The Millerites rejected notions of gradual “christianization,” taught that Christ will come before the millennium (“premillennialism”), and used sophisticated publicity to promote their beliefs. After the “great disappointment” on 22 October 1844 (the date Miller eventually settled on), some Millerites regrouped as Seventh‐day Adventists, who continued to take prophecy seriously, though avoiding date‐setting.

After the Civil War, a new kind of premillennialism, “dispensationalism,” gained popularity. Based on the Englishman John Nelson Darby's interpretations of various prophetic texts, dispensationalists fashioned a detailed end‐time scenario, including worsening world conditions (which made sense in an era of often turbulent social change); the rebirth of Israel; Antichrist's rise and the “pretribulation rapture,” whereby the faithful are snatched from the earth to escape the horrors of Antichrist's reign. Spread through prophecy conferences, Bible institutes, and the popular Scofield Reference Bible (1909), dispensationalism became almost synonymous with Pentecostalism and fundamentalism in the twentieth century. Hal Lindsey's best‐selling The Late Great Planet Earth (1970), the Left Behind novels of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in the 1990s, and countless other paperbacks, television programs, video tapes, and films spread the dispensationalist doctrine. The strong support for Israel among fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and James Hagee was rooted in dispensationalism.

During the 1990s, apocalyptic views were tied to two well‐publicized and ill‐fated groups: David Koresh's Branch Davidians, a defection from the Seventh‐day Adventists, who died in a confrontation with federal agents in Waco, Texas (1993); and Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate followers, who combined New Age and millennialist teachings to justify group suicide in Southern California (1997). A revival of postmillennialism was also apparent in the New Christian Right's efforts to create a “Christian America.”
See also Christian Coalition; Fundamentalist Movement; Moral Majority; Mormonism; New Age Movement; Protestantism; Religion; Revivalism; Roman Catholicism; Seventh‐day Adventism; Shakerism; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Michael Barkun , Disaster and the Millennium, 1974.
Ronald Numbers and Jonathan Butler, eds., The Disappointed, 1987.
Timothy Weber , Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, 1987.
Paul Boyer , When Time Shall Be No More, 1992.
Thomas Robbins and Susan Palmer, eds., Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem, 1997.
Timothy P. Weber , On the Road to Armageddon, 2004.

Timothy P. Weber